Book News: Reading Fiction May Boost Empathy, and Other Stories from the Week

The results of a new study published Thursday in Science suggest that reading literary fiction may have a positive effect on social skills. The researchers, David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, who are social psychologists at the New School for Social Research, in New York City, found that subjects who were asked to read just a few minutes of literary fiction, such as works by Don DeLillo or Alice Munro, performed better on subsequent tests measuring empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence than subjects who were given nonfiction from Smithsonian Magazine or popular fiction like Danielle Steel or Gillian Flynn. Though the study leaves many questions unanswered—like how “literary” the fiction has to be to have an impact, or how long the empathy boost lasts—the researchers hope that studies like this one, which demonstrate the quantifiable benefits of reading literature, could have an impact on curriculum design in schools. (The Common Core standards have attracted criticism for emphasizing nonfiction over literature.)

Dave Eggers has responded to the accusations of Kate Losse, a former employee at Facebook who said last week that Eggers’s new novel, “The Circle,” about a young woman working at a powerful Internet company, rips off her 2012 memoir, “The Boy Kings.” Losse wrote in a blog post last week that the two books are “unnervingly similar,” and that her book’s failure to be recognized was evidence “that something is not important unless a familiar, male white face does it.” (In response to Losse’s allegations, sites like Jezebel eagerly sought out similarities in the text of the two books.) In a statement released to Gawker and other Web sites, Eggers wrote that he had never heard of Losse’s book, and that he purposely avoided reading any books about Web companies while writing his book, which comes out on October 8th and was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine last week. “Because The Circle has not been released,” he wrote, “it’s my understanding that Kate Losse has not read my novel yet, so I trust that when she does read it she’ll understand that I have not read, and certainly never lifted anything from, her book.” (Losse admitted in her original post that she had not yet read Eggers’s book.)

French lawmakers are attempting to pass a new bill that would help protect their country’s independent bookstores by banning companies like Amazon from delivering discounted new books with no shipping charge. (Amazon has called the amendment “discrimination against online consumers.”) The bill passed in France’s National Assembly, and will move to the Senate. Amazon, meanwhile, announced that it will hire seventy thousand full-time employees for the holiday season.

The curators of the David Bowie exhibit currently open at the Art Gallery of Ontario have released a list of a hundred of Bowie’s favorite books. The list includes fiction titles by Junot Díaz, Christopher Isherwood, and Dorothy Parker, and nonfiction from the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Camille Paglia, and Greil Marcus. (Geoffrey Marsh, one of the curators, calls Bowie “a voracious reader” who is known to read as much as “a book a day.”)